"Bury My Heart in Recent History": Mark Twain's "Hellfire Hotchkiss," the Massacre at Wounded Knee, and the Dime Novel Western

While many authors recognize the importance of names, Mark Twain had an especially astute awareness. From the pseudonym that he chose for himself to the appellations that he created for his fictional characters, he was keenly attuned to the symbolic significance of a name. Given the centrality of names and naming in Twain's life and work, the topic has been the subject of sustained scholarly attention. Literary biographies such as Justin Kaplan's classic Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain and Everett Emerson's recent Mark Twain: A Literary Life discuss the author's creation of a writerly persona though various pennames. Likewise, critical articles, including John Livingston's "Names in Mark Twain's The Mysterious Stranger" and Laura Smith's "Fictive Names in Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson," investigate the memorable monikers that appeared in his writing.¹

In spite of the longstanding attention that this issue has received, one of Twain's most distinctive and arguably most unusual character names has largely escaped scrutiny: Hellfire Hotchkiss, from his 1897 narrative fragment with the same title. Echoing a query that has been asked of many of Twain's other characters, this alliterative appellation prompts the question: Of all the nicknames that the author could have selected for his central character, why this one? Given the author's awareness of the importance of names, what literary, cultural, or symbolic meaning did "Hellfire Hotchkiss" possess? Did the author's choice of this moniker have anything to do with his unwillingness and/or inability to complete the story?

This essay explores answers to these and other questions by bringing together a series of disparate biographical, literary, and historical threads. One of Twain's most memorable and unusual appellations, "Hellfire Hotchkiss" may also be one of his most coded and significant. Rereading the narrative fragment in light of the author's awareness about the importance of names, his longstanding connection to the West, and his acute interest in current events, the name assumes new symbolic weight and added cultural significance. Far from an accidental or inconsequential choice, "Hellfire Hotchkiss" may be a complex and multivalent moniker that embeds a reference to one of the most tragic and widely-publicized events of his day: the massacre at Wounded Knee seven years before.

In what has become an oft-retold account, on 29 December 1890, nearly five hundred troops from the U.S. Seventh Cavalry killed around three hundred Lakota men, women, and children near Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota.² Although accounts vary about who started the fighting and why, conditions quickly became chaotic and many exchanges of gunfire occurred at close range. While some Lakota were able to flee the violence, many died from exposure in the harsh conditions of South Dakota. The military enlisted a group of local civilians to bury the Indian dead, but a severe snowstorm hampered their efforts. When the frozen and—because of the frigid temperatures—often grotesquely contorted bodies were finally recovered, they were simply placed in a mass grave.

Resituating "Hellfire Hotchkiss" in the context of the massacre at Wounded Knee adds another facet to Twain's oft-discussed interest in historical events while it complicates generic understandings of the narrative. "Hellfire Hotchkiss" subverts not only the common gender coordinates of the dime novel western by presenting a gender-bending female figure, but perhaps more importantly its stereotypical racial ones. Written in the wake of one of the most brutal slaughters of American Indians by federal troops, the narrative eschews the longstanding practice in dime novel westerns of showcasing the extermination of "savage" frontier Indians by "noble" white forces. In doing so, "Hellfire Hotchkiss" embodies a previously overlooked coordinate on the map of Twain's complex attitudes about the nation's indigenous tribal peoples and national mythologies about the West. Although Twain apparently never mentioned the massacre at Wounded Knee in any of his letters, notebook entries, or published writings, he hardly could have been ignorant of the conflict. Throughout January and February 1891, the massacre remained a...